Week 3

I find myself frustrated this week that I do not have enough time to completely revamp my course right now! The ideas presented about types of assessment really make me want to dig deeper into how I evaluate the work of my students.

I found myself defending rubrics in the discussion, but also, defending tests and quizzes in my own mind. The readings really made me question the party line “tests are bad, only authentic assessment” that I had come to accept. Sometimes, there really is a place for assessment using tests and quizzes, and I am glad to have been exposed to Grant Wiggins' ideas about using tests in online learning. As a worked on form 6.3 and laid out possible assessments for the learning objectives, I found myself consciously looking at how often I had been assessing privately, and how often I had been doing so publicly (dropbox vs discussions for example). It was interesting to see my thinking when I first developed the course, in that I tried to balance the two without even knowing truly proper online course design.